6 Answers
6

When we started to evaluate MongoDB hosting, I tweeted about our initial results (DB size was reported differently) and whilst MongoHQ replied on Twitter to explain the differences in reporting, the MongoLab folks reached out to me directly and asked about our business needs and seemed to genuinely care about working with us.

We continued our initial tests against the free accounts on both hosts for a while but MongoLab's ongoing engagement and interest in our data volumes and patterns made us feel much more comfortable with using them for our business so we now have a dedicated two server (+ arbiter) replica set hosted at MongoLab.

MongoLab staff also spent time on conference calls ensuring everything was set up the way we wanted and helped us do extensive failover testing before we went live. We were very impressed.

For a fully managed solution, backed by enthusiasm, expertise and a demonstrated willingness to engage and assist their customers, we think the pricing is very competitive (compared to managed data center servers which cost us about double).

No noticeable difference on the technical side of things after using both MongoHQ and Mongolab. However I really appreciate mongolab's eagerness to correspond with its customers, quick replies to emails, and the overall good feeling that results from talking with them.

Me too, the support is better compare to MongoHQ. MongoLab replied in no time, but I am stilling waiting to get my questions answered by MongoHQ. However, my concern is MongoLab pricing goes from Large at $40 to custom DB (7.5GB RAM) at $600-$700, which is a huge jump. Whereas MongoHQ seems more granular.
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JohnnyAug 11 '11 at 14:35

Johnny...sorry about that. Lots of good stuff happening at MongoHQ right now so we have gotten a bit behind in responding to non-emergency requests. Our offering includes replica sets, user controlled backups and powerful web tools on top of arguably the world's largest provisioned MongoDB data layer. We have been around since the pre 1.0 days and have certainly learned over the last few years how to effectively run MongoDB in the cloud.

Also, we recently acquired MongoMachine. So, we are building our solutions for their customers as well. Busy but exciting!

Since hosting MongoDB in the cloud is new, both companies are likely to go through some growing pains which may or may not be a true indicator of which is the better provider for you.

We used MongoHQ for some of our early beta apps for Connect.Me and are getting ready to launch with MongoLab on a dedicated replica set. Ultimately, we chose MongoLab after corresponding with their technical support and getting comfortable with their roadmap and approach to customer service. For our needs at the moment, good support is critical so we can stay focused on building our app instead of managing infrastructure.

We also talked to a number of Heroku customers who ran into issues with MongoHQ. Of course, there's always the caveat that every service provider has issues at one point or another. Not to mention that cloud hosting customers often complain about provider issues when it's actually issues with the underlying technology and not the host.

What is your major consideration? Price? Uptime?
From my experience, I consider the price at first but I adjust my through afterward.

For traditional SQL database environment, the database version doesn't come out so fast. Mongodb is other stuff which is fast growing. I used to include some new feature in my application of every mongodb release. The version transparency so look important for my starup company situation.

For mongohq shared plan, there are little transparent of what version they are using, their planing to update. In their FAQ, they just mention version 1.6.x / 1.8.x, and you may find some more thing in their twitter. May be their Dedicated Plans, have better support and version control.

For mongolab, their support seems better, at least self support. You may know what is happening in their support page.

10 gen has release mongodb version 2.0 and planing to release 2.1 at Oct 12, 2011. The version gap of mongohq/mongolab is huge, or at least provide a latest environment for my testing. This version gap force me to setup a local development db with latest version and pending my application to release.

The reason I would like to choose a cloud db service like mongohq/mongolab is I would be a dub! I am lazy to learn something about version, maintenance, setup etc.